ROTTERDAM Netherlands AP The crooked skeleton with the gap-toothed grin is waiting at the back of the dimly lit gallery. To reach him you have to pass the fetuses of Siamese twins eternally joined at the chest and floating in a jar of formaldehyde. ``Whoa! That's gross'' 15-year-old Timon Kuijkhoven squealed as he came upon a deformed baby with a single eye in another bottle. Kuijkhoven was among dozens of visitors one day last week touring ``Up to the Bare Bones'' an exhibition of human remains that has transformed the Kunsthal gallery into one macabre museum. Curator Wim Pijbes denies he's running a little shop of horrors. Instead he says the exhibition aims to show the public how and why the remains ended up in a display case. Most people don't appear to care why. They're only interested in gazing with a mixture of subdued horror and morbid fascination at the gruesome exhibits. ``Oh no it's an arm'' gasped another visitor Antje Smits Schoon as she peered into a bottle holding what at first glance looks like a thick sausage. In fact it's the arm and hand of a 3-year-old child preserved in formaldehyde and for an unexplained reason clutching a leaf. ``The exhibit'' Smits Schoon declared ``is pretty weird.'' Articles on display include deformed fetuses and skeletons religious relics and works of art fashioned from human hair. There's even the salt-cured tongue of a 17th century Dutch traitor held in a little glass-topped coffin along with one of his brother's toes. The traitors Johan and Cornelis de Witt were killed by an angry mob in The Hague in 1672. Shortly after their deaths other bits of their bodies made the rounds of Dutch cafes where the regulars checked them out over their foaming beers. The Kunsthal exhibit causing the biggest sensation is the leathery remains of an Inuit fished out of icy waters near Greenland by Dutch sailors 200 years ago. Greenland's premier Jonathan Motzfeldt has asked the museum to take the body off display and return it to Greenland for burial. ``It could be the great-grandfather of someone up here'' he told Danish television this week. Pijbes has refused saying museums all over Europe have similar bodies on display. Meanwhile the Inuit its torso loosely stitched together and missing its face lies in a glass display case next to a mummified Dutch girl who was dug out of a peat bog. Many of these remains were collected as curiosities by 17th century Dutch scientists. Others have religious significance while some like the pair of underpants woven out of human hair have been created in the name of art. But the bottled remains are the stars of this show. ``Check this out. You can see its brain'' Kuijkhoven said pointing at a baby's head with half the skull cut away. ``It's a bit macabre. I don't really like it.'' With that he went over to look at the crooked skeleton. APW19981201.1221.txt.body.html APW19981201.0342.txt.body.html